


Wonderland

by citruses



Category: As You Like It - Shakespeare, Twelfth Night - Shakespeare
Genre: Crossdressing, F/M, Genderqueer, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-30
Updated: 2012-12-30
Packaged: 2017-11-23 00:57:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/616294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/citruses/pseuds/citruses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes she imagines that Cesario is still out there, somewhere, yomping around in his trousers making men and women swoon alike.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wonderland

**Author's Note:**

> Written for my Winter Holiday Commentfic fest on LJ, for icicleair, who requested an As You Like It/Twelfth Night winterland crossdressing crossover fic.

Sometimes she imagines that Cesario is still out there, somewhere, yomping around in his trousers making men and women swoon alike. Despite the likeness, the confusion, she knows that he was nothing like Sebastian, for Sebastian's manliness is more a matter of anatomy than bearing; it always was. Cesario was more male than most men -- so much so that she remembers more than once being surprised while changing clothes, the stark femininity of the body under his clothes making her start.   
  
It surprises her one winter morning, two years a married woman, when she wakes from a dream in which Cesario -- what? He walked through the town, that was it -- he was done up in new breeches, strutting around needlessly to show them off, bowing to gentlemen, chatting with traders. Orsino is away, due back tomorrow, and she's alone amid chilly white bedsheets that seem to be impersonating the snowdrifts outside; she feels her long hair on her shoulders and remembers.  
  
Sometimes she looks into his closet when he's away, for comfort, just a quick glimpse to remind her that she isn't without her man for long; but this is different. She lingers over the clothes, smelling the leather and touching the silk and velvet, for so long that she begins to feel at home in there. She barely realises that she's holding a pair of trousers, long and thick and slim-legged for riding, until they're halfway up her legs.  
  
Oh. Well. Harmless to pull them on and fasten them snugly, she supposes, and then, daring, drags a jerkin down from where it hangs and tugs it over her shoulders. Something will have to be done about her breasts, but that feels like a familiar problem, hardly an obstacle at all.  
  
She doesn't think of herself as Cesario as she sneaks out to the forest behind their estate. His boots crunch into the snow, leaving their indelicate impressions, and she marvels at the comfort of them, the ease with which they can be worn. She'd forgotten.   
  
No, she isn't really Cesario, though that's the name she gives when she meets another boy in the forest. Ganymede, he says, and tips his head politely. Cesario sees through him --  _her_  -- with little effort, but decides to keep quiet about it. (Two boy-girls in the forest! How fantastical, she thinks wryly, how improbable. What an interesting picture they must make together amid the frost-marked trees.)   
  
She -- he -- Ganymede -- is looking for a Jove to complete the mythological scene. "My lord," Ganymede calls the absent man, and tells Cesario to direct any lords he might find in the direction of this particular page. Cesario swears on his good name that he will.  
  
As they shake hands in farewell (Ganymede's fingers as soft pale cold slender as Cesario's) another fragment of last night's dream comes back -- in it, Cesario was being fitted for his new breeches, laying out his body proudly for the measuring-tapes -- whose? She flashes on an image of Orsino kneeling before her; yes, Orsino was the tailor, fitting her with the instruments of her masculinity --   
  
Her feet traipse on through the snow. It's easier by the minute, being this person, wearing these clothes; it feels more appropriate and right than she has for a long while, as though the forest were the site of reality, today, and her cold bedroom merely the place where she woke up wrong. A place for shamming femininity and longing to get out into the wildness, in spite of the biting cold that creeps into the bones.  
  
It isn't long before she finds Ganymede's man. A black-cloaked figure wandering aimlessly through the valley below her; he's looking about him, it's clear he is waiting for somebody. His page-boy, no doubt. And who else but lovers and madmen would be out in the wintry forest on such a day? Surely it is Jove, and now Cesario must play Aphrodite, matchmaking this lord to his wandering Ganymede.  
  
"Sir!" Cesario calls out, her boy's voice carrying as she strides down towards him, and the figure turns --   
  
It's Orsino. She flinches but makes herself keep the same pace, stomping downhill; his face goes through a number of expressions too quickly for her to parse them and then he makes for her, too.   
  
"Sebastian?" he says as she approaches, his voice all pleasant surprise and formality, and oh. That hurts terribly, tears coming hot into her eyes.   
  
How she wishes he had recognised her; or if not her, at least Cesario! She wishes he had fallen to his knees with joy to see her like this, his boy again. Most desperately of all she wishes that she had not found him here, playing Jove to someone else's Ganymede. Why doesn't he want to chase  _her_ through the forest? Why did he never ask this of her?  
  
As they draw level with one another something changes: No, she thinks. No. Wishes and why-nots be damned. Cesario's resolve breaks its feminine restraints like a dam, and the girl-in-boys'-clothes feels her limbs burn the winter cold away with anger and something else. Desire. This is my husband, she thinks. I want him to know me.  
  
"It's I," she says in her true voice, and tumbles her hair out from her cap the way she did on that day years ago, hoping he will understand that it means something different this time. No -- farewell that. She will  _make_  him understand.


End file.
